Wikipedia, and increasingly other Wikimedia projects like Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata, and Wikisource, offer powerful platforms for sharing knowledge with the world: they regularly find their way to the top of Google searches and are widely reused in other web applications. However, despite their ubiquity and flexibility for increasing access to knowledge, Wikimedia projects have sizable content gaps: from a systemic under-coverage of women, to poor representation of non-Western cultures and communities, to major gaps in specialized knowledge.

Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAMs) frequently partner with Wikimedia communities to help fill those gaps, increasing representation of the knowledge they curate and collect. Not only can GLAMs work with Wikimedia communities to profile knowledge unique to their institutions, but they can also promote the knowledge collected by the expert communities they work with and represent.

The Basque Wikimedia community works with local libraries to ensure that Children's literature is covered on Wikimedia projects.

Though early case studies in the library and museum professional literature limit using Wikimedia and Wikipedia to just "add links" to institutional websites in order to increase the visibility of knowledge, nearly a decade of partnerships and practice with the international Wikimedia community has shown that deeper partnerships create more impactful outcomes. These partnerships benefit most from the skill each organization brings: Wikimedia communities can provide knowledge of effective crowdsourcing and powerful platforms for sharing knowledge; and GLAM institutions provide the expertise in finding sources, topics, and materials that are most relevant to public interest and information seekers.

Partnership models typically fall into two broad types: working with digitized collections (click on this link to learn more), and sharing other kinds of knowledge curated by the institution. This page describes the latter set of tactics. Wikimedia communities can often bring a significant set of skills to these knowledge partnerships, including:

activating online volunteer communities to contribute to topics

teaching how to contribute to Wikimedia projects at in-person events

working with institutional staff to increase skills and capacity for using Wikimedia projects.

Below are case studies from throughout the Wikimedia community that profile these kinds of activities. Wikimedia communities often have experience supporting different levels or degrees of knowledge sharing activities, but the international community has examples, tools, and other resources to get you started. To find out more about your local volunteer community, reach out to your local Wikimedia Affiliate or contact a GLAM-Wiki volunteer in your area.

Typically described as "Editathons" or "Backstage Passes", cultural heritage institutions frequently host gatherings of Wikimedia volunteers, institutional volunteers, and staff in order to contribute to Wikimedia projects. Though these Wikimedia contribution events do not always result in the creation of large volumes of content, they are great opportunities for creating interest, energy, and skills relevant to furthering institutional efforts on Wikimedia projects.

These contribution events work best when focused on a particular theme or topic, and when they provide participants some type of incentive for participating, such as food, access to a part of the collection that isn't normally available, contact with a curator or archivist with deep knowledge of a collection, etc. Typically different titles or descriptions are given to the events, depending on their focus:

Editathons typically have their main focus on editing Wikimedia projects, including creating new Wikipedia articles and making changes to existing articles

Backstage passes usually feature a "backstage" exploration of a specific part of the institutional collection

Training or workshop – though most of these events will include a short introduction to contributing to the projects, some events are explicitly about training or developing skills or understanding of a certain part of Wikimedia projects.

Increasingly, contribution events are being used as an activity within distributed campaigns among institutions with similar knowledge expertise. These include the Afrocrowd initiative and Black Lunch Table (focused on African diaspora communities), the Art+Feminism campaign (focused on women in the arts), and others. Contribution events offer a powerful venue and tactic for engaging new contributors around under-represented parts of Wikimedia projects.

Considerations

Resources: Organizer of events; trainers for Wikimedia projects; space for the event; food to keep participants energized; research materials selected for the topic being worked on.

Scalability: Highly scalable: Editathons are one of the main tactics used by Wikimedia communities and partners to build awareness and literacy about the projects. Moreover, because editathons are good for building awareness and excitement about Wikimedia projects at GLAMs and among the public, they often create effective press and can lead to further interest in Wikimedia projects.

Challenges: The scale of content created at editathons varies widely depending on the participants at the event. Also, editathons require a lot of logistical investment on the part of hosts: communication, advertising, and organizing of support across the sponsor organization all require additional support.

Potential allies: Cultural organizations; Wikimedians with training experience; librarians are very valuable supporters for these events: they frequently can compile appropriate research materials for the activity.

Tips, Guides, and Tools

Where should you look for resources to get started with editing events? Try these resources:

Editathons are often very good ways to bring attention to content gaps on Wikipedia, and offer a really good opportunity for the GLAM institution to communicate how they are engaging in Wikimedia projects. The Museo Soumaya in Mexico City partnered with Wikimedia Mexico to break the Guinness World Record for longest Wikipedia editathon, by running a 72-hour editathon about the artist Rodin. The project allowed for targeted coverage of the artist, while also creating international and national awareness of their contribution to Wikipedia.

Each year the Art+Feminism organizers support a global editathon campaign focused on women and feminism in the arts during Women's History Month in March. The campaign supports editathons across the world, as a targeted way to impact the Wikipedia gender gap. Editathons are usually hosted by local GLAMs, or commercial art galleries in partnership with Wikimedians or activists. These events are particularly effective at bringing attention to the Wikipedia gender-based content and participant gaps; the coordinators for the project are incrementally learning how to increase content contribution to the projects through the editathons, with 2017 more than doubling the impact of 2016.

Wikipedians began the day with a welcome from Archives of American Art director John Smith.

Most backstage pass and editathon events with GLAMs focus on particular parts of the collections that are not particularly well documented in the existing projects (typically topics with only reliable sources available in special collections or other spaces). For example, at the Archive of American Art, they hosted an event in 2011 focused on a particular exhibition which they held specific materials for, the 1913 Armory Show. This narrow topic focused the participants at the event on something that would typically get missed by Wikipedia contributors.

One of the tactics that a number of institutions use to share institutional knowledge with Wikimedia projects is to prepare and engage institutional staff on the projects themselves. Though in the era of increased pressure on public funding for institutions it may not make sense for staff to be editing all of the time, providing targeted ways in which institutional staff can contribute can advance both organizational objectives and professional needs.

George Griffin, 53rd Battalion of Australia during World War I, with his diary. The image is an anchor for the List of World War I diarists, created by State Library of New South Wales staff.

There have been a number of institutional tactics for formalizing this participation:

Additionally, there is a long history of organizations employing interns or volunteers who work with the organization, to contribute to Wikimedia projects.

Establishing clear expectations about how staff participate in Wikimedia projects improves the success of these kinds of efforts. For example, though early case studies in the professional literature focused on "just adding links" to Wikipedia or other Wikimedia projects (for example), this was not well received in some Wikimedia communities. Instead, the best practice is for paid staff to contribute knowledge beyond just that stored at the institution, including citations and links to all of the best research materials on a topic, even if it's not held by the institution.

More guidance about professionals adding links and citations to institutional resources on Wikimedia projects can be found at this page on English Wikipedia.

Scalability: Staff contribution is limited based on interest and capacity; working with professional networks to integrate Wikimedia projects into training for staff at many institutions can strengthen the range and scope of that work.

Challenges: Institutional staff are typically over-capacity as is; asking for them to invest time in Wikimedia projects may lead to challenges. Participating in Wikimedia projects is unlike other forms of professional work for institutional staff: learning community dynamics can be challenging and requires adjusting expectations about how work time is spent.

Potential allies: Professional networks who can provide professional development for staff in large communities; internal to organizations, there is typically interest from digitally inclined or public-facing staff.

One of the premier models for staff contributing to Wikimedia projects has been the work of the State Library of New South Wales. Working with an institutional working group, members of the staff at State Library of New South Wales developed an internal policy for working on Wikimedia projects as part of existing projects and workflows. Using that policy, staff have contributed to a number of different projects, including a nearly comprehensive List of Australian diarists of World War I.

A Bibliowiki sticker acknowledging the participation of a public library in Santa Oliva d'Olesa in the larger public library network's Wikipedia initiative.

Catalonia's Network of Public Libraries has a program called "Bibliowiki", where libraries are recognized for hosting Wikimedia-focused programming at their institutions, including editathons, workshops focused on local authors and community heritage, and photo-scavangers hunts. When a library holds regularly activities, they get stickers recognizing that they are a "Bibliowiki" (roughly "Wikipedia Library"). Additionally, each year, they use the #1lib1ref campaign as a way to initiate interest among other librarians about contributing to Wikimedia projects. This strategy has allowed over 200 libraries to participate in the program, holding regular events and engagements for supporting Catalan Wikipedia and the representation of Catalan culture on Wikimedia projects.

The Pritzker Military Museum and Library in Chicago has focused their work as a GLAM-Wiki collaborator for a number of years, actively working to improve coverage of topics that they hold unique or special collections about. For example, the staff at the organization worked with student interns over the course of several years to add content to Wikipedia about American First World War songs. This targeted addition of content allowed for increased public visibility of the rare collections, and sharing information from relatively rare reference works.

In the 2017 1Lib1Ref campaign, the State Library of Queensland in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia set itself an ambitious target of 1000 additional citations to English Wikipedia articles about Queensland. We achieved over 1028 citations during the campaign, about one quarter of the worldwide total. Will your GLAM be able to beat that total next year? Read how we did it!

Many of the staff of the State Library of Queensland who were involved in the collaborative sessions held during the 2017 1Lib1Ref campaign gave feedback that they found the experience "enjoyable" and "empowering". So a regularly monthly QWiki Club session was instituted to enable staff at SLQ and other local GLAMs to continue that successful model of collaboration on contributing to Wikipedia. Participants are free to work on any topic they choose but most seem to like to work on the "theme of the month". A list of articles is prepared, divided into easier tasks for beginners and more difficult tasks (e.g. new article creation) for the more experienced. Some participants enjoy contributing so much that they continue to do it at home as well.

A poster depicting the impact of Wikipedian in Residence roles within the United Kingdom and supported by Wikimedia UK. Wikipedians in Residence are one model of embedded Wikimedian.

Sometimes, it helps to bring experienced Wikimedia volunteers into the staff of cultural institutions to facilitate their impact and ability to share on Wikimedia projects. The culture and operational mechanics of Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata and Wikisource, all have very different expectations and strategies for collecting content than typical professional editorial practices. Additionally, embedding Wikimedia communities can expose institutions to cultural change around topics like copyright, volunteer collaboration and public engagement in research projects.

Volunteer Collaborators/Coordinators – sometimes called Wikimedia Ambassadors, these volunteers come from a local Wikimedia community or affiliate and help coordinate activities, engagements or events with local institutions.

Wikipedia Visiting Scholars – Wikimedians who have a special degree of access to an institution, such as consultations with staff, access to data sets, or access to registration-required research materials, in exchange for focusing on topics on Wikimedia projects of relevance to the institution (for documentation of the model, see the organizing page on English Wikipedia)

Wikipedian in Residence – Since the first such position in 2010 at the British Museum, these Embedded Wikimedians, typically compensated in some way (whether with a paid contract or educational credit), collaborate with institutional staff to develop strategies or engagement tactics that integrate Wikimedia projects into institutional strategies (for documentation of the model, see Wikipedian in Residence).

Greater investment in the embedded Wikimedian role often provide the opportunity for more systematic and strategic collaboration between the institution and the projects and volunteer communities. However, some projects have scaled and created impact well beyond their investment, and some paid roles have not had as a large of an impact on institutions as others: the institutional context, the ability and interests of the embedded Wikimedians, and the interest of outside volunteer communities in these projects all change the scale of impact that these projects can create.

Documentation and resources Documentation for Wikipedian in Residence roles can be found at the following:

Wikipedian in Residence – A list of know Wikipedian in Residence roles across the movement and descriptions of their work

Resources: Committed and skilled Wikimedians for the embedded role at the institution; commitment of institutional resources and strategy at a level appropriate for the project; volunteer communities and staff receptive to collaboration on the project.

Scalability: Moderately scalable: Wikimedians in Residence often can mobilize institutional resources at scales much larger than volunteer coordinators, activating more interest and participation. One of the major limits for high impact Wikipedian in Residence positions is the cost of funding these roles. Higher scale of impact can be achieved by placing residencies in network organizations – for example, the York Trust (England), METRO (New York City), or Ergoed Gelderland (Netherlands).

Challenges: In the past, WIR, VS, and coordinator roles have faced challenges related to institutional commitment; developing broad support for the role across the organization can help with institutional investment and support; certain types of engagement tactics or projects may not have the lasting effects they could with limited cross-institutional support. Existing Wikimedia communities have a limited pool of volunteers or early professionals willing to commit to embedded roles or with the appropriate skills for high-impact projects. In recent years, WMUK and the Wikimedia Foundation have funded a number of Wikipedian in Residence roles filled by folks with limited or no previous Wikimedia Community experience to fairly high success.

Potential allies: Cultural organizations; Wikimedians with training experience; early professionals in a cultural field (like Library Science or Museum Studies) or similar space (history, art history, digital humanities); Wikimedia affiliates experienced with placing or mentoring new Wikipedians in Residence or Visiting Scholars.

A video interview of both staff at the Museum Trust and its institutions, the Wikipedian in Residence and other UK volunteers

In 2014, the York Museum Trust hired a Wikipedian in Residence, Pat Hadley, to work with the four institutions within the trust. This cross-institutional work allowed for the Wikimedian in Residence to support different types of collections and different types of interest across each of the institutions, and the different curatorial staff among the institutions.

Inspired by the passing of Adrienne Wadewitz, who had been developing communities of support and interest in the gender content and creator gaps on Wikipedia, the library at West Virginia University decided to create a Wikipedian in Residence Role for Gender Equity. Funded through a grant by the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization hired Kelly Doyle as a Wikipedia in Residence, who then actively developed programming and skills among librarians, faculty and students to contribute to Wikimedia projects about women, especially women in Appalachia. Since that initial year, she has expanded the various models for outreach, including a targeted project to do outreach with sororities at WVU and other universities.

Wikidata, the youngest Wikimedia project, has lots of opportunities for expanding the impact of institutional knowledge. One of the first pilot projects to embed Wikimedians with a specific focus on Wikidata was at the National Library of Wales. Modeled off existing Wikipedia Visiting Scholar positions in the United States, the Wikidata Visiting Scholar had access and support for interpreting and using several sets of metadata from the National Library. With that data, coverage of paintings and photographs of Wales were enriched on Wikidata, and visualizations and other tools were applied to the content to learn more about what it contained.

Shalor Toncray had been a Wikipedia editor and volunteer with the Library of Virginia, and decided to bring those two roles together. Working with the librarians and digital staff at the Library of Virginia, Shalor has helped make sure that topics covered in the Library's own digital collections were effectively integrated into English Wikipedia and other projects.

Cultural heritage institutions are in a strong situation where they can both identify the gaps on Wikimedia projects and can often provide access to the research materials, either through their physical collections or through online resources, needed to support those topics. However, mobilizing just local Wikimedia volunteers or institutional volunteers may not provide enough energy for covering all of the topics of interest.

Similarly, there are a number of collections within heritage organizations which are part of the colonial record or part of a more international history beyond the local place, so exciting a global group of volunteer about engaging the material from a GLAM can lead to unexpected and diverse impacts across the Wikimedia projects.

Considerations

Resources: Committed and established Wikimedia organizers, who understand how to contribute to the community, and can define the scope of the project; staff time and institutional resources to help identify topics and connect materials with the topics.

Scalability: Moderately scalable: Editing campaigns have some scalability due to their ability to attract contributors in geographies well beyond the typical space for a GLAM or other institution. However, the number of community members able to participate in these projects is usually bounded by a level of interest in the project; scaling outside of typical Wikimedians may be a solution for this (for example, #1lib1ref called on library staff).

Challenges: Coordination of online-only activities can require a lot of communication and documentation ahead and during the activity. Setting up the initial infrastructure can require on-wiki knowledge (though increasingly the Programs and Events Dashboard and judging tools like Fountain can simplify this).

Potential allies: On-Wiki organizers; cultural heritage staff familiar with the topic area that you are working with; judges for the content (if it's a competition).

Working with the Federal Archives of Bulgaria, volunteers in the Bulgarian Wikimedia community have worked with archivists to identify important media files that illustrate the cultural history of Bulgaria over the course of many years. Using these uploaded media files as a foundation, the Archives has organized a number of digital campaigns and competitions to write more content inspired by the images. The main one is the Annual "Archives Challenge", where they invite Wikimedia community members to illustrate Wikimedia projects with the images, and to create content that helps the images become more visible. Each year, dozens of Wikipedia articles are written, the images are added to other articles, and descriptions are improved throughout the files on Commons.

Wikidata unlocks a number of different opportunities beyond contributing to one language Wikipedia. Objects or concepts related to institutions can be described first in Wikidata, and then act as a source of material for Wikipedias. Building on a larger Europeana initiative to represent 10 heritage objects from each of the 28 member states in the European Union, called Europeana 280, Wikipedian in Residence Liam Wyatt organized the European Art History Challenge to crowd-source descriptions and articles about those art history piece across European languages. The project generated 816 Wikipedia articles in 28 languages as well as over 1346 labels in those languages, allowing Europeana to use the Wikidata content in their own digital tools and applications.

Contributions from institutions can be big and small, and of various degrees of complexity. Each year the Wikipedia Library team and affiliates from around the world run the #1lib1ref campaign which asks librarians to engage by "adding one more reference to Wikipedia". The campaign has been particularly successful in communities that already have strong library relationships, like the Amical's partnership with the Public Library Network, or in Norway and Sweden where they have already pioneered significant library outreach. Particularly with libraries, but with GLAMs in general, there is a lot of opportunity for small skills or knowledge to be shared from the institutions: so #1lib1ref acts as a gateway for skill sharing and understanding how that is possible.

Beyond the objects which cultural institutions curate and might make available through digitization and digital catalogues, most institutions collect and enrich metadata and other structured information about their collections. This data can be used for a number of internal and external purposes. For example, the Getty Art Research Institute publishes large databases that are widely used to describe and enrich art collections.

Wikidata, the newest project in the Wikimedia ecosystem, provides a valuable environment for connecting and enriching this data. Unlike traditional database projects, Wikidata's light-weight crowdsourcing strategies and broad scope allows for learning about unexpected connections within the data, and has a number of powerful tools that allow for visualizing and analyzing the data. Additionally, Wikidata provides a lot of features for recording, synchronizing and crosswalking between different authority controls and controlled vocabularies used by other data authorities. These features allow institutions to use Wikidata both in their own websites and to enrich existing collection data.

Scalability: Wikidata projects are highly scalable, because they often require only limited contribution from volunteers and staff, and large sets of data can be integrated with relatively limited actual activity.

Challenges: Wikidata and Linked Open Data are often hard to communicate; institutions can be defensive of their data and its editorial practices; depth of knowledge and skill about Wikidata in the Wikimedia community is currently limited.

Wikidata offers a robust way to connect different kinds of heritage data between and among institutions. One early example of this kind of project was in Belgium. Wikimedia Belgium, local volunteers and a consortia of Flemish art museums ran a series of workshops and data uploads from several institutions. These uploads provided a number of different opportunities for connection and analysis among the collections.

Instead of uploading content to Wikidata, the Yle Archive focused on matching its standard controlled vocabulary for describing its archive of public radio segments. The archive, which includes tagging of many different subjects with descriptive metadata, transitioned from using Freebase to using Wikidata to describe their collections. This connection allows for more topics covered by Wikidata to be used to describe their collection, and provides functional opportunities for using labels and descriptions from other languages.

Wikimedia content is available to the world under a free license (CC-BY-SA or freer). Embedding Wikimedia content either in the digital presence of a GLAM or in the physical exhibition spaces of the organization can be highly beneficial: the content is constantly being enriched in a public space, and the API's and technical access points for the content can be widely reused by outside websites. For example, Wikipedia-based descriptions can be used on Websites for topics not deeply researched by the institution, or QR codes could be placed on exhibition placards next to physical objects to provide more context.

Including Wikimedia content alongside authoritative content can include interpretative challenges: its important that labeling and attribution communicate that Wikipedia is not created by the institution's staff and may change. However, there are a myriad of benefits from embedding Wikimedia content: access to multilingual content; continued enrichment of content through crowdsourcing and Wikimedia community processes; and high quality contextual knowledge for low cost for the institution.

Considerations

Resources: Knowledge of Wikimedia projects and their technical endpoints; digital projects with clear gaps/needs beyond what is collected on institutional sites.

Scalability: Embedded content projects are highly scalable: they require fairly limited changes to code on the consumer end, and can be good engagement opportunities for focusing efforts on gaps in Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons or other Wikimedia projects.

Challenges: Institutions may be reluctant to cede control of some content on websites or in installations; creating tactics for reviewing and enriching content on Wikimedia projects may support this.

Potential allies: Metadata librarians and catalogers; data-or web-focused staff at institutions; local cultural-promotion agencies (QRpedia has been used to promote heritage materials in local constituencies, for example); curators or installation directors.

Jimmy Wales scans a QRpedia code during a visit to The Children's Museum.

QRPedia is a free service supported by Wikimedia UK, that allows the creation of language-independent QR codes for Wikimedia pages. When readers scan the QR codes, instead of resolving to a specific Wikipedia article. For institutions with physical collections, QRpedia codes can provide extended content for viewers of the collection. The Indianapolis Children's Museum curated content on several of its important collection pieces on Wikipedia, by engaging interns to write content there. Once these pages were increased in Quality, they placed QR pedia codes on the

Sample of Commons' image in the Dictionary of Species on the Llen Natur website.

A text-based bird scientific dictionary for Welsh speakers, called the Llen Natur Species Dictionary, had previously had not illustrations for the various parts of their reference material. By using Wikidata, to connect Wikimedia Commons media files to authoritative materials in the institutional collection: the institution gained some of the value of Wikimedia projects crowdsourcing effort, while focusing on what they do best: curating authoritative knowledge from experts.

The Wikipedia Education program emerged during a similar window of time as GLAM-Wiki (c. 2008–2010) to complete outreach to another important audience and contributor to Wikimedia projects: educators and students. The program has developed a number of strategies for effectively engaging students and learners of all types in contributing to Wikimedia projects.

Increasingly GLAM organizations collaborate with the educators, to help facilitate and focus Education projects. The most common support, comes from university librarians who help teach and design the research assignments. However, other GLAMs have worked with both classes of students at other institutions, or groups of interns or other learners affiliated with the GLAM. These projects, allow for dynamic learning and sharing activities for both the institutions and the students involved.

Resources: Institutional research materials; experience designing for learning and student engagement; time and energy for supervising learning and participation over the course of the participation.

Scalability: Moderately scalable: the Education program is well defined and very successful at creating content and engagement of educators and students. There are some constraints based on the timescale and structure of working with different learning situations and environments.

Challenges: Working with different kinds of students requires different kinds of knowledge and skills; coordinating timing and capacity for both GLAMs and educators can be challenging.

The GLAM Macedonia user group regular hosts gatherings of school age students at museums in Macedonia called "Wiki Clubs". These WikiClubs provide a valuable opportunity for engaging students in the topics of interest to the Museum, and has received national awards for innovation.

Education programs focus on a number of different learner audiences: commonly, many of the programs focus on students at universities. However, one innovative education program from the Czech Republic provides a specific training program focused on the training of senior citizens. Working with the continuing education staff at a public library, Wikimedia Czech Republic ran a series of training sessions focused on bridging senior technology skills with Wikipedia contributions. The program had high retention rate of editors, and encouraged senior citizens to continue using library collections and resources as part of contributing to Wikimedia projects.

Staff at Eastern Washington University's special collections ran an editathon at their university as a means of outreach and engagement with the student body. Focused on one topic well represented in their collection, a head of the sports program at the University, they encouraged student engagement in the special collections and research resources at the University, while also increasing visibility of both the topic and the research materials at the special collection about the topic. The project, unlike more generalized editing events, was specifically focused on engaging students and learners at the University in the Archives as a research process.

Collaborating with Wikimedia projects means collaborating with a digital community of practice that has it own particular nuances. We highly recommend finding help in that community, to make sure that your activities engage community expectations and projects successfully. To find help, we recommend starting at: